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Torigen Immunotherapy Vaccine: Hope for Pets with Cancer Podcast

If your Tripawd dog or cat has cancer, this episode of Tripawd Talk Radio is for you! “Torigen Immunotherapy Vaccine: Hope for Pets with Cancer,” is an in-depth discussion about the company’s breakthrough cancer vaccine therapy that any veterinarian can give to a dog or cat with cancer.

Three things to know about the Torigen immunotherapy vaccine:

1. What is a pet cancer vaccine?

2. How the Torigen vaccine helps dogs and cats fight cancer.

3. Where to get the Torigen vaccine

Jessee is a hoppy recipient of the Torigen Immunotherapy Vaccine for Pet Cancer

Torigen Immunotherapy Vaccine
Great Dane Tripawd Jessee received the Torigen Immunotherapy Vaccine

Well today was the BIG day. Jessee’s first Torigen vaccine. This is the vaccine that was prepared from her cancer cells. They were harvested during the amputation procedure and shipped overnight to the vaccine maker. She had to complete chemo before beginning this phase. It consists of three shots. One each week for the next three weeks. The goal is to boost her immune system to fight any sign of the cancer returning. Fingers crossed. She had no reaction to the vaccine and it was just a small injection in the back of her neck. — First Torigen Vaccine, Jessee’s Journey

Get the inside scoop from Torigen’s Chief Medical Officer, veterinary oncologist Dr. Michael Lucroy. 

Learn the facts about Torigen’s breakthrough vaccine for dogs and cats, like:

  • Why immunotherapy is now the fourth pillar of cancer therapy
  • What is a pet cancer vaccine?
  • How the Torigen vaccine works in dogs and cats.
  • Why it should be considered before amputation, for best effect
  • How it can slow down lung metastasis
  • Where to get the Torigen vaccine

Watch the video about the Torigen Immunotherapy Vaccine, or download the podcast (below) and play when you’re on the go.

Check out all of our articles about immunotherapy for Tripawds with cancer. And also, these Tripawds Discussion Forum Search Results about the Torigen vaccine can teach you about members experiences. Be sure post your own questions about immunotherapy to get help from the community.

Dr. Lucroy Explains How Torigen Immunotherapy Vaccine Helps Dogs Beat Cancer

Tune in to Tripawd Talk Radio and download our podcast to listen on the go. A full transcript follows.

Torigen is not currently available in Canada. We will let you know when this changes. 

Transcript:
Torigen Immunotherapy Vaccine: Hope for Pets with Cancer

Torigen Immunotherapy Vaccine for dogs and cats

TRIPAWDS: We are very excited to welcome back Dr. Michael Lucroy, who we first interviewed back in 2009 about cancers in dogs, metastasis, and chemotherapy. Well, a lot has happened in the past decade when it comes to veterinary oncology. And Dr. Lucroy is now Chief Medical Officer at Torigen Pharmaceuticals. And Torigen provides advanced cancer care solutions for companion animals including a personalized canine cancer vaccine, a therapeutic vaccine to help dogs fight cancer. He is the author of HELP! My Dog Has Cancer. And you will find many more credentials in the show notes.

Torigen is doing some exciting stuff that offers hope for pet parents whose dogs have cancers. So let’s get started. Welcome to the show, Dr. Lucroy. Thank you for joining us.

DR. LUCROY: Thanks for having me. I can’t believe 10 years plus has passed since our last chat.

TRIPAWDS: I can’t either. That is amazing. And so much has happened in those 10 years like with you. Let’s start with you for just a second.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and then why you decided to move from practice to working at Torigen.

DR. LUCROY: Sure. I’ve done a lot of things, worn many hats. And so, I’ve spent close to a decade in academic practice at Oklahoma State University and Purdue University. Spent a decade roughly in private specialty practice from Central Florida to the Indianapolis area and has spent some time in industry first with Elanco Animal Health and working with their R&D team for over 5 – I guess it was close 5 years.

Then before joining Torigen, I was actually serving as the Director of Clinical Studies for MedVet and that’s a group practice that at the time was about 23, 24 practices but they continue to grow and add to their group of specialty and emergency hospital. 

And about a year and a half ago, joined the team of Torigen. They had an exciting opportunity and it was the right time and who knew, I guess it was a little bit of luck that I would be out of clinics before the pandemic struck. I guess dodged that scary situation being out and about.

TRIPAWDS: Yeah, what timing. Oh my gosh! And now, Torigen must had something pretty special going on for you to like go over there because I mean you have had your finger on the pulse of veterinary oncology for so long and worked in so many different areas.

What we want to learn today is what is so special about the Torigen immunotherapy vaccine and what they are doing to help dogs with cancer. Can you give us a little background on just general, what is a cancer vaccine? What does it do?

DR. LUCROY: And differentiate between the types, preventative versus therapeutic, that sort of thing. Those are great questions. So I guess if we kind of think about what was going on at Torigen, if you kind of think about the classic pillars of cancer management, the classic ones are surgeries, you cut it out, you think about radiation therapy so you’re burning, but radiation therapy is one. And then you wage what I fondly refer to as chemical warfare, so you’re using chemotherapy. And for hundreds of years, those were really kind of two and then since the 1940s, we’ve had the third pillar with chemotherapy. So that has really been the way we managed it.

On the human side, immunotherapy has become the fourth pillar of cancer management.

I think what the guys at Torigen were doing was really working towards making that reality to add to what’s already out there for treating pets with cancer. So our hope is that that’s going to become the fourth pillar of cancer management among our animal friends, because if you think about immunotherapy, the area we are working in is this new sort of vaccines. So really what we are trying to do is leverage the immune system to help fight cancer. And there are a number of ways you can do that.

Cells learn about all the different proteins that are present in that cancer and can hopefully go and find them throughout the body.

With the vaccine, really what you’re trying to do is get a specialized group of lymphocytes called T lymphocytes to go and kill cancer cells. But you got to teach them what the target is, so that’s what our vaccine does is therapeutic vaccine in that we are going to take material from the patient’s own cancer to create the vaccine so that all those potential targets that are present in the cancer can be presented to the immune system. So then, those cells learn about all the different proteins that are present in that cancer and can hopefully go and find them throughout the body.

If we think about preventive vaccines, because when we use the word “vaccine” everybody thinks about, these days, you think about MRNA technology for COVID. But really, preventive vaccines are designed to kind of teach the immune system a lesson before you encounter the problem. So, there are some examples in human medicine about preventive vaccines and probably the most notable is the HPV vaccine. So we know that infection with HPV greatly increases the risk for several cancers like cervical cancer and also for things like squamous cell carcinoma, some forms of head and neck cancer. So if you get vaccinated for that then it does prevent that risk for cancer later on in life.

As far as the veterinary world, we don’t really fully appreciate how many cancers maybe driven by viral infection so that has not been something that has been readily available to date.

TRIPAWDS: Wow! So this has been going on in human medicine for quite a while and I find it interesting that we hear a lot about how dogs are helping discover treatments for humans. But right now, it’s kind of the reverse situation.

Torigen Immunotherapy Vaccine for dogs and cats

Immunotherapy is becoming the fourth pillar veterinary oncology. Do you have any idea why it’s the reverse process for this type of treatment?

DR. LUCROY: Yeah. I mean often, it is kind of the other way for sure. But I like history, so if you go back in the history books, immunotherapy, really the idea that the body’s immune system would kind of monitor or patrol or police the body for the presence of abnormal cells like cancer cells that theory of immunosurveillance was first proffered in 1959. And the early vaccines were studied in rabbit animal models back in the early 1960s.

So it really kind of skipped the clinics and veterinary medicine and kind of was explored in people. I think one of the limitations is just the idea of the reagents that you can use in the lab to study an immune response. If I want to study what happens in a mouse’s immune system, there are catalogs of reagents that I can order and use those to test the immune response in blood samples and things for mice and for people.

So for dogs, there are a few but not very many. And for cats and horses, pretty much nothing. So it’s really difficult to study the immune response in those companion animal species relative to people.

But now things are improving so we do have more reagents. And I think that’s going to help us moving forward. Also, there was a renewed interest, it’s kind of vaccine strategy combined with other forms of immunotherapy. So for example like things checkpoint inhibitors, so these things go in their antibodies that block the interaction between cancer and certain signal on T cells because when that switch gets flipped, it shuts off the T cells so the T cell doesn’t want to kill the cancer cell anymore. So if you can block that checkpoint then you can actually just allow that T cell to go and do its job.

TRIPAWDS: That is so exciting. 

I didn’t realize you could combine all these different types of immunotherapies.

DR. LUCROY: Yeah. And so we don’t have – we are a new company so we don’t have data with our product but there was a study a few years ago, dogs with primary brain tumors that are good models for people with brain cancer. And what they found was that the dogs who got the autologous cancer vaccine got some benefit. But when they combined the autologous cancer vaccine with the checkpoint inhibitor, the survival times doubled for those dogs.

TRIPAWDS: It is a really exciting and not to go off on some tangent down the rabbit hole, but

Do you think we will ever see preventative vaccines for specific cancers in dogs? And are there developments – are these types of developments you’re doing now kind of heading – leading the way?

DR. LUCROY: Well, with the autologous approach, it’s really individualized. We use the unique changes in every individual patient’s tumor to create the vaccine. And then they’re kind of – I guess it’s how you think about antigens that are present in cancer, so some of them are very much unique to an individual. There are fewer that are kind of common amongst all cancers.

And some of the proteins are actually what we would call self-proteins. So it’s a normal protein found in the patient but the immune system doesn’t recognize. So we have to add in things like an adjuvant to stimulate a more exciting immune response. And those are harder targets but maybe found in more cancers.

Two tumors are never exactly alike. It’s tough to just come up with that off-the-shelf solution for managing cancer. Maybe we will get there. There’s a group that has looked at that’s kind of preventative model but the problem with that is you need thousands of dogs over a dozen years to really see that your vaccine, peptide vaccine make a difference in cancer incidents over time. So these studies got started but it’s going to be a long time before we get to the endpoint to understand that that’s truly going to be preventive.

TRIPAWDS: Good. So let’s get back Torigen Immunotherapy Vaccine specifically and how that’s working.

TRIPAWDS: Yeah, because when we first started hearing about this, a few of our members keep talking about the Torigen vaccine, the Torigen vaccine. And we had – we didn’t know anything about it. So I thought, we need to learn what this is.

Tell us some background info on the Torigen Immunotherapy Vaccine for pet cancer. When was it developed and made available for the public and who is intended to help?

DR. LUCROY: Yeah. So this technology, one of co-founders and our Chief Technology Officer is Mark Suckow and he is a veterinarian, and this was actually developed in his lab at the University of Notre Dame. And actually, our CEO, she was his graduate student so kind of took this technology and being the business-minded person had an interest in commercializing it. So the company has been around for a little while but really, we started making vaccines available for folks in the public around 2015. So it has really been about 5 years where it has been available on a limited basis.

So we are not fully licensed by the USDA. We are working on an experimental therapeutic license as we complete the steps needed for full product registration. As you look on the website, you see all the language around that talks about we haven’t officially determined the efficacy and officially determined the safety. But it has been out there for about 5 years and we’ve seen growth over those years and that’s exciting that we’re able to help more and more dogs, cats, horses, we’ve treated ferrets, we’ve actually treated a few exotic cats in zoos. So this is really kind of a cancer type agnostic and species agnostic sort of therapy. So really any solid tumor that we can run through the process, we can create a vaccine for. And assuming the patient can mount and immune response, we should see some benefit from that.

TRIPAWDS: That is so exciting.

We never get to hear about immunotherapy vaccines for cats.

TRIPAWDS: And in layman’s terms, I’m hearing you say that it’s not for a specific type of cancer but dependent on the animal, you can craft this vaccine to help prevent say, metastasis or further spreading of different types of cancer.

DR. LUCROY: Yeah. And we’ve even had – it is a therapeutic vaccine so it is our goal to kind of slow down the process. Horses get melanomas especially these grey horses and they happen around the tail and they can be massive and difficult to remove surgically. And we’ve got anecdotal response or reports from veterinarians that when they sent us some tissue and they vaccinated the horses, that over time and it takes a while, it takes many months, but over time, the lesions have stabilized and actually started to decrease in size. So that’s exciting because often, it’s hard for the immune system to work with big, bulky cancers. At least getting some of that feedback helps us as we try and formulate plans for what is the optimal dose schedule look like and things like that.

TRIPAWDS: That’s a great segue. Maybe we could talk about the Torigen immunotherapy vaccine process. I mean you’re taking tumor out, crafting vaccine and putting it in.

Torigen dog cat cancer vaccine

So maybe you could explain a typical treatment protocol.

DR. LUCROY: Say we have double, if we’re talking about a three legged dogs then we’re certainly talking about dogs with osteosarcoma. But essentially, what we need is – to run through the process, we need a diagnosis. So if the veterinarian hasn’t already made the diagnosis, we can take part of that tissue and send out for pathology to get the answer. And then we can just retain part of that tissue until we learn what the answer is then start the vaccine process.

But what we do is we mechanically disassociate the cells into a single cell suspension. The idea is that if you do it mechanically, we are not going to change the characteristics of the proteins or antigens on the cell. When you work with cancer cells, you grow them on a Petri dish, they want to stick to each other. And so the classic way when you work in a lab is to use an enzyme called trypsin, which just chops up proteins indiscriminately. If you have proteins that you are trying to show to the immune system and it’s important to the structure orientation that they are in, if you break all those bonds up then the immune system doesn’t really have anything to work with. So when we mechanically break those cells apart, we keep those proteins in intact.

Then we use a chemical fixation step because we don’t want to give live cancer cells back to the patient so we use a chemical inactivation step but it actually fixes those proteins in place. And then we use and adjuvant to kind of stimulate the immune response and then that is the basis for the vaccine. And it’s given once a week subcutaneously so just like a regular vaccine literally like rabies or anything else that’s given subcutaneously. So that’s given once a week for three consecutive weeks. It’s a few trips back and forth to the hospital but it is something that could be done in either a specialty practice setting or in a general practice setting.

TRIPAWDS: I’d like to back up for a second.

You’ve use the word adjuvant a couple of times. And I just – I would love you to explain what that is to folks that aren’t familiar with it.

DR. LUCROY: Yeah. So it’s just something that you add to the secret sauce I guess. It’s something that you add to the vaccine product to really make the immune system more interested or agitated by it to get a better immune response. So in our case, it’s a protein that causes that. In many vaccines, it’s a metal salt. For a lot of them, it’s like an aluminum salt. There are some strategies that you use to try and get more of a B cell response.

So for like infectious diseases like rabies, you want to get your B cells that make antibodies up and running. But for things like cancer, you want T cells. We use different adjuvant to try and stimulate that type of immune response.

TRIPAWDS: Can samples be taken after the leg and tumor are gone? 

DR. LUCROY: Yes. We need the tissue. In the manufacturing world, the process is called GMP or good manufacturing practices. So we have a GMP process and that means that we need fresh tissue. You can’t go into formalin and that’s the usual thing you do is you take a biopsy, you put in the formalin then you ship it off to the pathology lab. But our process requires fresh tissue. So we can’t use anything that has been in formalin.

So it’s kind of like of chess. You have to be thinking a step or two ahead of what you’re going to do. So if immunotherapy is on your radar then you know that you need to have some fresh tissue available and you can’t put everything into formalin otherwise that process isn’t going to work.

In lieu of amputation, I don’t think we’re quite there yet.

And I’m not really worried about an amputated dog. I had a three legged dog due to osteosarcoma so it’s not a big deal. It will be fine. But that is the – when you think about amputation and why we are doing that, one, well, I guess the big piece for making the diagnosis, it deals with the pain, it deals with the risk for fracture. So there are a lot of benefits to the amputation. And it may not be possible to get a large enough sample from the bone to really create the vaccine and still leave the bones OK because the osteosarcoma bone is kind of weak.

Think about a column. A column architecturally will bear a lot of weight. But when you have part of that column eroded from the cancer, that’s subject to collapse. And so, if you got bone started to weaken and now we’ve taken out a 5 or 10-gram piece of tissue then I think you really up the risk for fracture.

So I think at least at this point, the way the process works, we probably wouldn’t be able to do this in lieu of amputation or other therapy.

TRIPAWDS: And pet parents need to know enough to ask about Torigen at their vet prior to amputation so that sample is taken and sent to you guys.

Let’s talk about availability. Can any vet give the Torigen Immunotherapy Vaccine?

DR. LUCROY: Yeah! This is available to any veterinarian in the United States. And so, we actually provide free tumor collection kits to veterinarians so they have everything they need at the outset. So that way, you don’t have to call, get the stuff, and then delay surgery. They’re ready to go. They have materials on-hand. And the kits contain enough material to sample three different tumors. And what’s in the kit is prepaid FedEx overnight shipping so all they have to do is just put the sample tissue in the vial that’s included.

There is always paperwork, that’s what makes the world go round, so there is just basic information about the patient and the hospital and everything that we need to just get things ship back and forth and understand about the disease. And then there is an informed consent because we are still an experimental therapeutic then there is a requirement of the USDA that all the owners will sign the informed consent that just goes through the fact that yes, it is a new therapy and it hasn’t been fully approved and then it just goes through the side effects that could be encountered.

TRIPAWDS: In a perfect world . . . the vet has the kit and takes the sample within hours of the actual surgery. Is that how it would work?

DR. LUCROY: Yeah. We like to have it shipped as quickly as we can. And so, that’s why we have the overnight express priority, whatever FedEx calls the quickest service possible. We want it to us as quickly as possible. So that allows us to get the best vaccine created that we can.

TRIPAWDS: I believe you said it takes the labs there about 72 hours to generate the vaccine and get it back. But if this animal has just had surgery, does that vaccine have a certain shelf life or is it given right away right after amputation or and/or how often?

DR. LUCROY:So I think as I have gone looking through our database, it seems that many veterinarians just wait until suture removal to start the vaccine. There’s no need to do that but I think it’s as much convenient for the owners as anything. You could give it straight away. And we haven’t determined the exact expiration date but we’ve done some testing in the lab and it seems 18 weeks in the refrigerator is probably still a viable product but that hasn’t been fully determined yet.

TRIPAWDS: Can the Torigen immunotherapy vaccine be used instead of chemotherapy? Or is it best to use with chemo?

DR. LUCROY: Well, we don’t know the answer to that one yet. That’s a great question. And so we are trying to learn that. As a small company, these are not insignificant investments of dollars to run studies to answer these questions. We do know from mouse studies and other species that there is some benefit and synergy between some types of chemotherapy and immunotherapy.

So for example, there are some of the platinum drugs that are commonly used to treat osteosarcoma after surgery that kind of have positive impacts on the immune response. So there might be some benefits there. Other types of chemotherapy drugs like Palladia which is a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, there are multiple studies ongoing combining those types of drugs with immunotherapy with vaccines. So we think there is some synergy there but we haven’t looked at the outcomes yet. So tough to know whether it should be all of the above or instead of, so we’re still working through it.

TRIPAWDS: Oh, I’m sorry. But I’m curious how the company would actually get that data because a of people, they ask, “Where does information about my dog’s longevity go like how they need with this type of treatment? Does it just go poof, out into nowhere? Or does somebody actually keep track of how they do?

Can that information be used as part of an actual retrospective study?

DR. LUCROY: Yeah. And so one of the challenges of retrospective studies is that, no two dogs get processed or handled the same way. And so that has been – so I’ve been trying to go through the database. We got thousands of animals that have been treated with the vaccine but we go through – we do try and actually, we have it automated so the veterinarians get a link that has request for information at regular – and the rules after the vaccine.

But like any other survey tool, the response rate is quite low. So then you go back to try and fill in the blanks. They have to contact the veterinarians again. They don’t always send you records to look at. So that’s kind of tough.

And so like for regulatory purposes, we are going to be doing a prospective study and with that that’s done kind of the good clinical practice guidelines. So with that, all the data will be unified and collected in uniform manner, study monitors where essentially all of those come in and we want to make sure that the medical record jives what the study records look like and how many errors in data entry and things like that. That’s as good a job as you can do trying to collect data for clinical outcomes.

Then yeah, you start the clock and everybody’s clock starts on the same day and you know when surgery was precisely and then you can follow them. If you get them imaged regularly then you can know when the disease first seen and maybe metastasized to the lungs for example. You can then very clearly define those endpoints in that population.

But that costs a lot of money to do these kinds of studies so at least in a small company, we are going to focus on probably a single disease state and do that first and then once we get through the regulatory process, it will be a bit easier to do some of the other studies.

TRIPAWDS: If metastasis has occurred, can that sample be taken and used to fight it at that stage or is it too far spread at that point?

osteosarcoma Torigen vaccine

Koda the Rottie Tripawd has also had Torigen.DR. LUCROY: No. So that can actually be the source of material is that metastatic lesion. Now, if we talk about dogs with osteosarcoma, that’s generally a lung lesion so that’s not a simple surgery but I mean it’s straightforward enough, I say as a non-surgeon, but for the folks that do that for a living, that’s not a huge deal to go in and get one of those nodules removed. If there’s a cutaneous or subcutaneous nodule that you can feel under the skin or in the skin, that would be easy, kind of low-hanging fruit to get that material to be used for the source.

TRIPAWDS: And just to be clear, there is no data on how effective that would be but it is something that a pet parent can explore.

DR. LUCROY: Right. And for some folks, it is much earlier, it’s just that concern over risk. I don’t know. Maybe it has been 5 or 6 years ago but on the journal, Animals, there was a paper published that just looked at that very question. So, there’s 60% of pet parents who decided that, “Hey, I don’t want to pursue chemotherapy regardless of the known efficacy,” because of the concern for adverse events. And I learned a long time ago, you don’t fight folks over that. Aunt Susie went through chemotherapy and she had a rough time. Well, you can talk to her blue in the face about that’s not how we approach dogs, but it doesn’t matter, right? So I don’t – I never fought people over that if that’s what they thought but that’s their experience and I can’t change that.

DR. LUCROY: Our team published at the end of 2019 the safety experience in 93 dogs. And what they found was that the group of dogs, there was about 10% that did have an adverse event recorded. They were all treated at a single surgery center and they all went through the process where they had surgery and then they got 3 doses of the vaccine. And it was all kind of all-comers so it didn’t matter what kind of cancer they have. But the adverse events or side effects were really limited to a little lethargy, there was a little bit of discomfort at the injection site, and a couple of the dogs had a low-grade fever for a day or so, but nothing required intervention.

Relative to other therapies, I think that’s a pretty favorable profile.

So I think the risks are low. We’ve got a paper that we submitted on cats. We looked at 117 cats and they had a low adverse event rate. So we think – then based on, we just looked at the horses as well and they have a little bit higher rate but the number of horses was smaller so I think it was just an artifact of just having a small study population. So overall, it seems to be safe.

Since 1960s this has been studied in multiple iterations and people, there haven’t been any serious adverse events recorded in people as well. So I think that goes with the idea if we think about kind of species-dependent, it doesn’t really seem to matter what species you are working with, that it seems to be well-tolerated.

The only sarcoma we’ve published on was hemangiosarcoma. So we looked at dogs that actually have metastatic hemangiosarcoma, that’s a devastating disease of dogs. The surgery-only dogs, their median point of survival or median survival is right around 40 days. What we saw with the dogs that got only the vaccine had equivalent survival to the dogs that were treated with maximum tolerated dose chemotherapy. So it wasn’t great with this horrible disease but the median survival time of those two groups is identical at 142 days with no adverse events recorded in the dogs that get the vaccine.

We think there is some potential for – I mean we have to optimize things. We are so early on. But certainly, we are seeing efficacy signals in some of these early studies.

TRIPAWDS: So that takes us back to what you originally said about Torigen being – the goal of being too slow progression or create stable disease, right? This is no cure. It’s going to stop things.

If metastasis spread fairly wide throughout the lungs, taking a sample isn’t going to reduce the number but keep more from growing, right?

DR. LUCROY: Right. Right. And that’s part of the strategy. And so that’s why in people, we are learning over the last 50 years has been that the earlier or lower stage your cancer is, the better you do with the immunotherapy. And so yeah, we kind of picked the worst case scenario, right? Hemangiosarcoma is tough. And then you start with dogs that have disease in their lungs or liver and like, I mean that’s a tough place to start but like many human clinical trials, you kind of start with that patient population that doesn’t have a lot of other options. And if you see the signal of efficacy then that prompts you to go and do some other work there. So …

TRIPAWDS: It sounds like it’s offering some serious hope and another option if people are aware of it ahead of time to nip things in the bud, get that sample off and give the vaccine a try. Dr. Lucroy, this is so fascinating and so hopeful. We can’t thank you enough for being here today and sharing all of this great information with us.

TRIPAWDS: I had a question to wrap up there I saw in Rene’s notes there, about the future of Torigen. It sounds like Torigen, the immunotherapy we are talking about is like the key product or key drive behind the company.

What is next in the future for Torigen, the company?

DR. LUCROY: Yeah. So we are looking at other immunotherapy options that might be a little bit more off-the-shelf because we recognized that sometimes hey, the tumors recurred or gee, I just found out about this and now there is nothing, I can’t create the vaccine because everything got thrown or whatever. So we are looking on some things that maybe more appropriate for kind of an off-the-shelf solution that a veterinarian could either have on hand all the time or get it on-demand, “Hey, here’s the tumor that’s inoperable but here’s something I can use to treat that.” So we are looking at some immunotherapy that may help us with those kinds of situations.

TRIPAWDS: That’s great. Another tool in the toolkit. We are fans. This is awesome.

DR. LUCROY: If we have some veterinarians tuning in, I just recorded yesterday, I’ve spent a lot of time recording on Zoom but I will be – I have an on-demand session about immunotherapy and autologous cancer vaccines, talking about all the technologies that are available at the ACVIM Forum. So for any veterinarians that need some CE and want to sign up for the form, it’s going to be virtual this year so it will be happening a little bit later in June.

TRIPAWDS: Awesome. That is so cool. I love what you guys are doing and I can’t thank you enough. You’re making a lot of people really happy and full of hope.

[End of transcript]

Torigen Immunotherapy Vaccine Clinical Studies

BMC Vet Res. 2020 Nov 18;1 Evaluation of an autologous cancer vaccine for the treatment of metastatic canine hemangiosarcoma: a preliminary study

Anticancer Res. 2019 Apr; Safety Evaluation of Autologous Tissue Vaccine Cancer Immunotherapy in a Canine Model

Torigen Immunotherapy Vaccine, Explained

Torigen Vaccine Conclusion

The Torigen immunotherapy vaccine is a good option to help dogs and cats fight cancer. It can also help stabilize cancer lung metastasis in pets with advanced cancer. Torigen side effects in dogs and cats are minimal. Any veterinarian can give your pet this vaccine, by contacting the Torigen company for more information.

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